Lessons Around How and When to Have Difficult Conversations with Employees
April 14, 2022
by an investor from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in Toronto, ON, Canada
Though effective leaders tend to possess a multitude of different skills and abilities, my experience as a CEO taught me that the most important skill for any leader to possess is that of clear and effective communication. Indeed, a CEO’s strategy is only as good as her ability to communicate it.
Though some of the basic tenets of effective communication are obvious and intuitive, others are less so. Though I had always thought of myself as an effective communicator, the experience of actually leading a company over many years illustrated that good organizational communication often goes well beyond the basics.
In this blog, I will share with you some of the most important lessons that I learned about effective communication within my own company. Some specific things that I discuss include:
- If, how, and when to share bad news with your employees
- If, how, and when to communicate that a termination has been made
- To what extent should you share your company's financial results with your employees?
- How many times you should expect to say something before it's truly retained by your employees
- How the mood of the employee base tends to directly reflect the mood of the leader
Link to read/listen is below. Please enjoy.
from University of Pennsylvania in San Francisco, CA, USA
In his book, The 4 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive , author Patrick Lencioni posits that the highest performing CEOs tend to be maniacally focused on four primary things: Building and maintaining a cohesive leadership team (see my blog about this here); Creating organizational clarity; Over-communicating organizational clarity; Reinforcing organizational clarity through human systems (“human systems” referring to things like hiring, performance reviews, and so on). My experience as a CEO helped me appreciate just how important these four things were. Over time, I came to appreciate that many of the problems that surfaced within my company were actually just symptoms of a larger underlying problem, being lack of organizational clarity. These problems included anything from resource constraints, to product decisions, to disagreements at the management team level. Not coincidentally, the more deliberately I focused on creating and over-communicating matters of organizational clarity, the less frequently these problems seemed to emerge.
Great reminder of Lencioni's important work.